Wireless communication technology now offers high quality voice and data services, with further enhancements on the horizon. As is well understood by those of skill in the art, wireless communications face several quality of service (“QOS”) challenges that are not found in wired communications. More specifically, the quality of the wired link can change according to environmental factors, movements of the wireless subscriber station, or movement of objects within the path between the subscriber station and the base station. Despite advances to wireless communications, however, certain QOS limitations are still common. For example, transport control protocol (“TCP”) packets employ a time-based fail check strategy, wherein packets that are not acknowledged as received are continually resent according to a predefined time period, the spacing between each delivery attempt increasing gradually. After a certain number of retries, the connection is deemed to have failed While this strategy can be effective in a wired link, it is not as suitable for packet delivery over wireless links that are experiencing connectivity problems.